Communication networks, such as the Internet, corporate intranets and the like, have become the chosen form of information distribution in the workplace, as well as, the home. With the need to access information from such networks increasing, so to is the need to provide a means for monitoring the information distributed by such communication networks. Monitoring of this nature heretofore referred to as “usage monitoring”, can provide valuable information, statistical or otherwise, to network service providers, network users or network beneficiaries, such as network advertisers.
The network service providers can benefit from usage monitoring in many different applications; for instance, it will provide the capability to create network user profiles based on the information that the user has accessed and the information that the user has provided to the network. User profiles are beneficial to the service provider in many applications, such as, intelligently caching data (i.e. storing copies of network pages accessed by the user) and/or prefetching data (i.e. predicting future network page access and storing such). Additionally, usage monitoring information is instrumental in case of a network security breach. It provides valuable post-breach information that can be used to trace the history of the breaching party.
Communication networks, such as the Internet, have provided another medium over which advertisers can distribute information and solicit customers. Because of the vast numbers of people who rely upon the Internet on a frequent, if not daily, basis, advertisers have invested enormous amounts of money to deliver advertisements via the Internet. Unfortunately for advertisers, advertisements that are merely distributed on a mass basis are not typically cost effective since many, if not the majority, of the recipients have no interest in the particular product or service being advertised. As such, advertisers commonly work to target the advertisements to a subset of people who are believed to be most interested in the product or service being advertised. For example, new homeowners may be most interested in security systems and, as a result, residential security companies may target their advertising to the new homeowners. To be able to target their potential customer base, the advertisers must be able to access usage monitoring data in a real time fashion and be provided with data that is formatted, or can be readily formatted, to address the demographics to which their particular product is addressed.
Additionally, usage monitoring information can be important to Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) as they serve to optimize their distribution network on the basis of usage information and provide better services to their clients and the subscribers.
Network users, such as households or corporations, can benefit from usage monitoring information by monitoring the usage of individuals within the household or the corporation. Such monitoring insures that the individuals are not accessing inappropriate information or spending an inordinate amount of time browsing the Internet or intranet.
While communication networks, such as the Internet, provide a medium over which an enormous number of people communicate, network service providers, network beneficiaries and the users themselves have generally been unable to determine the exact nature of the users, the content of the information accessed by the users, the demographic breakdown of the users and other usage related information. For example, network advertisers have had difficulty determining, in real-time, both detailed demographics regarding the users and information relating to the actual content requested by the users. Network service providers have had difficulty tracking, in real time, the information accessed by any one user so as to provide more intelligent caching and prefetching capabilities, security breach investigation capabilities and the like. Additionally, the network users (i.e. households or corporations) have not been provided with an adequate means of tracking the use of the individuals (i.e. family members or employees) in terms of content accessed or duration of the access session.
In this regard, current techniques exist for monitoring network usage at different discrete locations within a communication network. For example, network servers and/or routers located within the stream of network communication can monitor usage by keeping logs of access requests for the content hosted by the server. These logs provide information about the number of users that access a particular page or a set of pages and the navigational sequence through the pages. Software is also provided for performing statistical processing of the server logs. Likewise, usage can be monitored at the user level, i.e., at an individual's computer, by keeping, in memory, a log of the content accessed by the user. This log provides information about the usage patterns of the individual user including the content accessed, the navigational sequence through the content and the amount of time spent on each page. Further, some Internet service providers (ISPs) can include a proxy-caching server that stores the most frequently requested information. These proxy-caching servers can be designed to monitor the web content usage of those users that are routed to the network via the proxy-caching server. Unfortunately, proxy-caching servers require user intervention by a network administrator or the like in order to appropriately configure the proxy cache. Further, not nearly all client requests are directed to the proxy-caching server, thereby rendering the usage data incomplete and much less valuable.
As will be noted, each of these prior techniques is associated with and monitors the usage of a discrete device or portion of the web. For example, monitoring that is conducted at the server level and at the user level obviously only identifies usage occurring at the server and by the user, respectively. In addition, monitoring conducted via a proxy-caching server only identifies some of the client requests for a particular ISP network. While these various types of usage monitoring are of some assistance to network service providers, network beneficiaries and network users, these entities desire usage monitoring on a much broader scale covering many different users attempting to access information hosted by many different servers, potentially on the networks of many different service providers.